Wednesday, May 24, 2017

Fake history and fake news

Over at The Spinoff I've written about the latest, and perhaps last, controversy created by veteran pseudo-historian Noel Hilliam. Last week the Northern Advocate and its sister paper the New Zealand Herald ran an article by Mike about some skulls Hilliam had lifted from an urupa somewhere in Northland. Hilliam claimed to have sent the skulls to Scotland, where a non-existent pathologist had decided they belonged to Welshmen who came to New Zealand three thousand years ago.

Journalists, archaeologists, historians, and Maori leaders all took to social media to criticise Hilliam, and the Advocate and the Herald quickly deleted Barrington's article from their website. Radio New Zealand's Mediawatch team has dedicated part of its latest show to wondering how any journalist could fall for Hilliam's fantasies, and blogger Pete George has also scratched his head.

My piece for The Spinoff argues that the notion of a 'white tangata whenua' originates in New Zealand's neo-Nazi movement, and has spread through conservative parts of the Pakeha population because it serves not only a political but a psychology purpose, by giving Europeans marooned in the antipodes a local lineage and a sense of belonging.

There's been quite a bit of comment about the piece on social media - one hundred and seventy-eight comments on The Spinoff's facebook page, and more elsewhere on facebook, as well as on twitter and reddit - and I've been fascinated to see where the defenders of the 'white tangata whenua' thesis have come from. When that determinedly left-wing organisation Peace Action Aotearoa put a link to the Spinoff piece on its facebook feed, one member vociferously protested. At The Standard, heartland of New Zealand's left blogosphere, Noel Hilliam also found a defender. I wonder whether I've been too quick to characterise the 'white tangata whenua' argument as a purely right-wing phenomenon. Does it have a curious appeal for some on the left?

19 Comments:

Yes, it is confusing to see how many people are willing to suspend disbelief enough that these stories can catch hold. Unfortunately white supremacy and fluffy thinking aren't restricted to the right. The Waitaha rainbow people stories are most popular with hippies and new agers (and they don't even see race). A lot of this stuff appeals to people who didn't get NZ history or critical skills in school (who did?), so they don't have the knowledge base to recognise all that is being ignored, to recognise white supremacy (how can celtic pride be racist? you must be racist against white people), or to recognise when information is being manipulated to suit an agenda. Because of these failings in our schooling, we get all these non-racist (sometimes anti-racist) people supporting that racist agenda, ignoring the harm it causes, because 'truth'. If you show up how implausible the stories are, for example requiring a decades-long government and academic cover-up of evidence, or that there are alternative more likely explanations, you threaten their sense of who they are--smart, free thinking, egalitarian (which seems to add up to anti-intellectualism). I don't know what the answer is, but I really appreciate the efforts you make. It's pretty upsetting seeing my family advocating for white supremacy when they know the effect on me and their grandchild. My father, who adores his grand child, can't stop himself or open his mind even for her sake, and that leaves me pretty despondent and angry.

You'd be amazed at the number of people who think the internet has proved 9/11 was a false flag operation and, sure as night follows day, will believe online claims that the Manchester Ariana Grande attack was the work of MI5 to subvert the possibility of a Corbyn victory.

The internet has given voice to a much bigger than previously suspected subset of humanity who are given to paranoia and believing in conspiracy theories.

That's a sad story, Kim - but I think that most people, myself included, carry around a variety of mistaken ideas based in conscious or unconscious bigotry, and that these ideas don't necessarily have much impact on their day to day behaviour. I had an uncle who said he hated Asians, on account of the war he fought against the Japanese (I don't know why he generalised from Japan), but who was always friendly and solicitous to the real-live Asians he encountered on his street and at his local mall.

My feeling, Sanctuary, is that the whole notion of trying to arrive at a relatively dispassionate account of the past is anomalous and very fragile. In most societies history-telling has been unashamedly partisan, designed to boost the prestige of this or that group or leader and disparage others. Those of us who are interested in the truth about the past are probably perverse creatures, in the scheme of things.

There's nothing wrong with conspiracy theories. I think it is possible for example, that 9/11 could have been an 'inside job' to whip up enthusiasm for war and so on.

And some people simply like mystery.

There are also those who link their theories to White Supremacism.

The question is, does it also attract the same people who like systems such as Marxism? Well I was once well into Marxism etc. I knew people in the various communist groups who were quite racist. The working class are often more racist than the so-called middle class etc although this of course is a generalization. But many I saw in the left were still inherently somewhat paternalistic in their outlook. Also Marx himself was Eurocentric and flawed. Of course he was a great thinker with many great and interesting ideas.

But he emerges from the enlightenment believing in this thing called "prgress" which is a myth. It is linked also to Darwin's evolution. The idea is that some people are better or more advanced or more civilised and so on. In fact some of the intellectuals used Darwin's ideas and discoveries to justify genocide as in Australia and other places. Hitler had nothing on those who preceded him.

The danger is this idea of advancing. Darwin I think was aware of this problem, perhaps this is why he called his (I think the second book on evolutin) The Descent of Man. Jacob Brownowski wrote the more hopeful Ascent of Man based on his TV series but in that (great book as it is) one feels he 'protesteth too much' and in fact is himself doubting that there will ever be this mythical thing called 'progress'.

Yes, things change into myriad forms and in myriad ways: but overall they get better? This is not provable in any way. It is a human-centered illusion. But this applies as much to religion as to politics of the right or left or to anything else. This idea of White Supremacy is also nonsense. (As by and large Darwin's and other work in that area is correct for a closed system).

But if such 'ideologies' are set aside we should try as objectively as possible to determine historical events. We can never have any certain knowledge but some things are clearly wrong and the argument behind them, being on of these 'progressive' things, is dangerous. We simply know it. We don't need a theory to know it. We have seen these people in action and they can come from any direction.

I also think people have always sought meaning and reason to give them comfort in the face of the apparent randomness of violence and fate. Once, they sought out the church and ascribed to the Lord the omnipotence required to orchestrate great events. Nowadays, stripped of the solace of a belief in God, people instead seek reason and meaning in conspiracy theories and pseudo-pagan mysticism.

I agree. But I would say that "religion" is actually essential for humans. I think, for example, that typical of the errors of the Bolsheviks and Lenin et al was to either prohibit or proscribe religion or worship. Mysticism or religion in some form is necessary to human beings. We cant know what consciousness is. We are in an essentially unknowable world. I thus proscribe to a strange belief. I believe that there simultaneously is and isn't a God or gods. So I get to a position something like that of Hegel say with his dialect of Nothing creating something. In a sense it depends on a belief. But I remain skeptical. So that if someone says they know there is God I am interested but want to know how they know they know. On the other hand dry total atheism I would dispute. But I cant prove that there is nothing rather than something and so on...or there was nothing. Or that we are not in a mad man's dream etc...But the alternative beliefs can move into certainties for some people. This I can understand. The problem with knowledge is not (only) that the things sought to be known is true, but that the person who would know a thing has to believe that thing to be true. So it is possible for a scientist, who knows a lot, is sure one day of many scientific 'realities' to suddenly stop believing in any of them (regardless of any reason for this by the way it might just be a random event). This means that that person now can say and might, that he or she knows nothing. That Na and Cl don't constitute water, that the earth is not a globe but may be flat, and so on.

So to some extent not believing is useful. In fact though we take positions as in the case of the man who hated Japanese (I had a neighbour who was our neighbour in the 50s and had been in a Japanese prisoner of war camp and hated Japanese, I couldn't persaude him otherwise: and a boss I had once, an industrial chemist hated Indians, said they wipe their arses with their bare hands and then shook your hand! But he was o.k....he and I worked for Bitumix about 1966 on Roading work etc testing stresses and inspecting the roads). Most of my life I worked in labouring or works with tradesmen (Lineman etc) and the best it seemed were the Polynesians who were pretty basic (the young men when I was young always wanted a fight, as if that was something to do of an afternoon! The (mostly Samoan) people lived in Ponsonby.

As a Lineman most blokes I worked with when they saw Pacific Islanders started talking about "bungas" and coons etc. Most of them were quite racist. But I just had to go along with them as I was out numbered. Some weren't, some were quite enlightened and I think some of the ignorance came from simply not reading much or mixing as they did with their fellow rugby players.

But, that said, and given not all were like this, I got on pretty well with most of them.

I think if you haven't mixed with such people you can think every one around you is a liberal. The mistake the middle classes made as Hitler used this misconception to gain power. Hitler and his propaganda chief Goebbels were master myth makers and started to re-write the world's history. We all know the result but reading about Australia's history, it seems the exterminating (of Aboriginals) Australians, the British (Indians of India and Africans), the Germans (in Africa), various in the Pacific, the Spanish and the Americans (the Indian aboriginals - a la 'Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee') and others including New Zealanders in rel. to Maori pre-empted Hitler by about 100 years...Montaigne spoke out in his essays against the depredations of the Spanish and others in their extermination attempts (were these things planned?) of the South American and indeed those of the present day United States (the Apaches). Montaigne maintained that they were human and not savages but his views weren't shared by the Church at the time or the colonists.

Kim McBreen I don't think you need to have things taught to you at school I think the ability to know or act in critical ways really comes via one's parents in the formative years. Schools that I attended in the 50s around here that is Tamaki Primary etc were reasonably open to Maori the prejudice if any I found amongst children before they got to school. But mostly we got on with Maori. Although there weren't many around here.

Martin Edmond writing his bio. (he is a little younger than I) tells that in a school in the Wairarapa growing up Maori might not have existed (especially for those of the professional classes) so I cant generalize from my own experience.

My father used to say that he thought Maori were good in a team but no good on their own...He didn't drink and in the good old days Maori around here used to booze big time....

I think our education was reasonably unbiased but slowly people learnt about the injustices. But I recall being fascinated by the fact Maori came here across the huge ocean in small boats and set up a society. In some ways I thought of it as a wonderful thing. I also liked reading Dickens and thinking of London in the 19th Century...so there are many contradictions and complexities.

'Syphalization' Tim Shadbolt was later to say of Western "Civilization" as the bombs rained down on Vietnam, Cambodia and anywhere else the US could find a target...(they had already firebombed Tokyo and other Japanese towns before Hiroshima and Nagasaki...

Ooops! ....Na and Cl don't constitute water (hydrogen and oxygen) is wrong of course! It should be salt. But the scientist might also "forget" or start to doubt that the world rotates, that plants and animals need oxygen. Remember this unblief in things could be simply a random event.....